Saving Astronomical Treasures

Abstract

The time domain is under-exploited in an astrophysical context, because the large photographic plate collections are almost never consulted by young astronomers. This is a result of lack of education of the more recent generations of astronomers, and of the deluge of terabyte-size datasets produced by new observations. Yet astronomical plates represent a unique set of resources and their quality does NOT improve with time. We point out valuable scientific projects that can be conducted with archival images and describe a first step to realize this at the Uccle Observatory, in Belgium.